Meet Shulamit Puder, Chief of Staff for Gale Brewer
This is the update for Thursday, June 30. Today was exhausting. I’ve been recording, commenting on, and petitioning for a solution to the chaos on the roadway in Central Park at West Drive and 63rd Street for going on 5 weeks now. A lot of good stuff happened today.
Brewer’s Chief of Staff, Shula Puder, finally got back to me with a phone call today and gave me more than 20 minutes of her time, for which I am very grateful. She promised to get back to me in a week to ten days with answers to the questions of why our crosswalk is not already a school speed zone, like Google Maps says it is, and how we get it designated as one with a 15 MPH speed limit and a traffic-calming device like a speed bump to get the speed of all incoming traffic reduced to the posted speed limit.
In my experience from using the pocket radar, most “fast traffic” is moving 24-30 MPH. Most tourist bicycles move at 15-16 MPH. The higher-speed travelers in all vehicle types will be more inclined to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk if they are all calmed down to 15-20 MPH first. At this speed, they will be much more inclined to stop for pedestrians, especially if others, like municipal vehicles and tourist bicycles, are doing it, too.
Bicycles and other vehicles not stopping on red and giving the families, kids, babies, elderly, and disabled that we call “pedestrians” a chance to move across the crosswalk unthreatened is the biggest part of the problem. Solving it starts first with calming the traffic.
I hope Shula can help. Labor Day is just two months away.
NEW SETUP ON THE CROSSWALK
I continue to experiment with the camera setup now that we have two cameras. Today in the morning, I moved the downstream cam to the east side of the road to avoid having the sun in the background and placed it between the sidewalk and the roadway, directly across from the hot dog vendor.
The morning hand-held footage was also shot from the east side of the roadway, behind the moveable caution sign. Since the horse-drawn carriages drive on the west side of the roadway, they often block my field of vision from my usual position behind the barrier on the west side of the roadway. We got over an hour of good footage with two camera angles from the east side this morning.
A spectacular parade of four police vehicles and a black van appeared while I was shooting. They actually stopped at the red the whole time and just sat there until the light turned green, all the time my downstream camera was flashing its white LED warning lights and recording them.
In the evening, I returned to shoot a little more and fixed the hand-held camera to one of the DOT signs in the roadway. That left me free to attend to the signal call button. When people would start to queue up on the crosswalk, I went and called the light. I did this for over an hour. This is providing a lot more useful footage.
Today’s screengrab is another swerve. This time the victim is a ballerina or her photographer. Moments before they were doing a little photo shoot in our crosswalk in front of the Manhattan skyline and when they turned to go, almost got nailed by an e-bike delivery rider who was barrelling thru the red light. Another near-miss.